When you tell customers and dealers that if they place an order by 5:00 p.m. it will be shipped the same day, you have to deliver. For Trek Bicycle, a global leader and manufacturer of bicycles and related products, that means finding the best option for shipping every single package, each and every day. “We make everything from kids’ bikes to $15,000 road bikes. We do business in over 100 countries and we have offices around the globe. We ship over 3,000 bikes a day. The afternoon is especially critical, as we work hard to get the last of those bikes out. Even more intense, our accessories department ships another 3,000 packages each day, pushing out about 1,000 to 1,500 packages in the last few hours,” said Loyal Reierson, Midwest Distribution Center Manager for Trek. With high volumes and a commitment to on-time performance, the biggest challenge Trek faced was selecting the right carrier for each shipment, balancing schedules, cost and reliability. In the past, an employee made that decision. But now, ProShip gets the job done. “We rely on ProShip to give us the best rate and fast service,” Reierson added.

ProShip helps Trek make the right shipping decision every time and brings increased efficiency to the entire process, especially the busy end-of-the-day rush. For example, in Trek’s accessory department, employees pick each product off the shelves and then take it to the shipping area, where the items are packed into boxes and sent further down the line to be processed by ProShip Velocity. The shipper places the box on the scale, scans two bar codes and a shipping label prints out. The label is placed on the box and the shipment is on its way. While the system is simple and easy to use for Trek employees, a lot is going on behind the scenes. The customer information is loaded into ProShip. The system rate-shops among all of the carriers Trek uses, selects the best option and prints a carrier compliant label for each package. ProShip provides shipping documentation and enables Trek to monitor package status, tracking numbers and more. It also provides the reports Trek managers need to analyse costs and performance. Multiply these capabilities by thousands of items each day and you can see how ProShip streamlines logistics, while increasing profitability and customer satisfaction. “We had been running ProShip in the U.S. for about a year, and then decided to roll it out to our European locations. Our Netherlands facility was the first to implement the system and it was by far our most complex integration,” said Tom Spoke, Trek’s IT Global Distribution Manager. Before ProShip, freight rating selection and rate settings were handled by a manager who directed employees to the carrier they should use, depending on the type of bike, the country it was being shipped to and the sales level. Adding to the challenge was the fact that Trek uses many different carriers in Europe. “One carrier has one zone for an entire country. Other carriers have eight or nine zones per country. Now all of the zones can be loaded into ProShip, and it determines which carrier with the best rate is going to which country,” said Geneo Helmink, European Logistics Manager.

“When we first initiated ProShip, we were growing at about seven percent each year. Last year, we bought a company that enabled us to step-up our growth rate to about 20 percent. ProShip’s scalability worked like a charm,” said Reierson. He added, “This is a high-quality system. We looked at the cost versus return on investment and soon found that the return on investment was less than one year. If Trek sees a return on investment in less than a year, we’re going to do it.” ProShip has also made life a lot easier for Trek’s IT team. “We don’t have to try to support the old homegrown systems. We’re now letting ProShip, the expert, do what it does best and support the systems for us,” said Spoke.